Sociology I / Culture, Socialisation and Education
Practice question · Match the pairs

Match each account of education to what it claims schools actually do.

  • Parsons
  • Bowles and Gintis
  • Bourdieu and Passeron
  • Willis
  • Mirror the authority relations of the workplace in the classroom
  • Select pupils on achievement and instil universalistic standards
  • Reward a cultural inheritance the school itself never taught
  • Are refused by pupils whose refusal delivers them to manual work
Hints
  1. Two of the four see schools as reproducing inequality without pupils noticing.
  2. One of the four found pupils who saw through the school and were trapped by their own insight.
Show the answer
  • Parsons Select pupils on achievement and instil universalistic standards
  • Bowles and Gintis Mirror the authority relations of the workplace in the classroom
  • Bourdieu and Passeron Reward a cultural inheritance the school itself never taught
  • Willis Are refused by pupils whose refusal delivers them to manual work
Why

The fourth entry is what makes the set worth learning together. Willis’s lads were not deceived; they correctly judged that school credentials would do little for people like them, and acted on that judgement in a way that guaranteed the outcome. Reproduction through clear-sightedness is a harder problem than reproduction through ignorance.

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